Las lenguas barbacoanas meridionales y el quechua

Towards the fifteenth century southern Barbacoan languages came into contact with several varieties of Quechua as a result of the former’s migration from the north to present-day Ecuador and the expansion of Quechua by the Incan occupation of the equatorial Andes and the evangelization that developed after the Spanish conquest. The outcomes of that contact included not only the shift of Barbacoan languages such as Pasto and Caranqui, caused by an expanding Quechua, but also different levels of Quechua-Barbacoan bilingualism that resulted in the mutual influence of the intervening languages. The present contribution deals with the influence of Quechua on the two southern Barbacoan languages surviving to date, i.e. Tsa’fiki and Cha’palaa. It begins by contextualizing Quechua-Barbacoan contact on the basis of historical evidence as a background for the analysis of Quechua lexical borrowing. The linguistic analysis focuses on the morphophonological adaptation of Quechua loanwords and their classification, according to semantic fields, in order to identify the time of contact and the type of situations in which such contact took place